Review: David Plowden, “Vanishing Point”

RECOMMENDED
A photographer’s photographer, acknowledged as one of the few remaining masters of the straight black-and-white fine print, David Plowden has sought through the last fifty years to bring the subjects that attract him for their detailed individuality to his viewers’ close attention. In this retrospective show containing his most celebrated studies of steam locomotives, steel mills, bridges, grain elevators and store fronts, the image that encapsulates Plowden’s sensibility and message is “Statue of Liberty from Caven Point Road, Jersey City, New Jersey” (1967), in which we see Miss Liberty in the far distance, a white silhouette against a uniform gray hazy sky with her back turned on a rutted black road in the foreground lined by telephone poles, at the base of which are strewn heaps of rubble. One of the phone wires cuts the statue at her neck, and a tiny sign on one of the poles reads—with full legibility—”No Dumping.” (Michael Weinstein) Through December 29 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior, (312)266-2350.